Bryan Adams alone with a guitar tonight, coffee with the police chief and a cricket final Thursday, Johnny Cash covers at the Legion Saturday, and a Labour Day weekend that belongs to Hymers. ✅ It's warm and mostly dry right through Sunday — but there's a 30 per cent chance of showers Friday and again Sunday, so check with the organizer before anything outdoors.

Wednesday, September 2

Thursday, September 3

Friday, September 4

Saturday, September 5

Sunday, September 6

Settle it for us, Thunder Bay — which side are you on?

Hit reply with your picks — we'll tally them and share how the city voted in an upcoming issue.

Where's the best slice in town? Which counter pours the coffee worth getting out of bed for? We stopped guessing and handed the question to you. 15 categories, about two minutes, one ballot per person.

Voting closes Saturday, September 5. Winners run right here on Tuesday, September 8, with a write-up on every one. If you've been meaning to get to it, this is the week.

Back the places you actually love — then go tell them you did.

✅ NO WEATHER ALERTS IN EFFECT

Environment Canada had no watches or warnings posted for Thunder Bay as of Tuesday evening. Latest alerts at Environment Canada.

🌥️ Wednesday, September 2 — Thunder Bay

Overnight low 11°C

Mainly cloudy · morning fog patches · humidex 29 · UV index 6 (high)

About 30 people turned out in Thunder Bay on Tuesday as part of a national day of action by health coalitions, timed to the day Alberta's Bill 11 took effect. Jules Tupker, co-chair of the Thunder Bay and District Health Coalition, says the Alberta legislation lets insurance companies into the delivery of health care and lets physicians bill those insurers — which, he argues, ends up letting people who can pay move up the queue. “Bill 11 is opening up the door to privatize health care,” he said. His message was aimed at Thunder Bay–Superior North MP Patty Hajdu and the federal government: “We're here today to tell Patty Hajdu: do something. Stop it.” Cheryl McSweeney, vice-president of political action for Ontario Nurses' Association Local 73, says the risk she watches is staffing — private and public providers competing for the same finite pool of nurses, therapists, PSWs and lab techs. “There's only so many people in the system,” she said. “When you privatize, you are competing for those resources. The public system suffers.” Tupker was blunt about the turnout: “This is an issue that concerns everybody in Thunder Bay.”

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🗳️ Your call: Thirty people showed up here for a question that touches everybody. Where do you actually land on it?

Lakehead announced Tuesday that Margaret Isabel Hall will lead the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law starting January 1, 2027. She comes from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., where she is a professor in the school of criminology, chair of applied legal studies and director of the MA in applied legal studies. The faculty has been running under interim dean Elizabeth Birmingham since Jula Hughes's five-year term expired in 2024. Hall has done this before: she helped build a new law school at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. She singled out the Thunder Bay faculty's grounding in Indigenous law and justice — alongside environmental and natural resources law, and sole or small-town practice — and made a case for law schools outside big cities, saying their strength is the community they build with local First Nations, the local bar, alumni and the city around them. “That sense of community supports student success in law school and beyond,” she said. Provost Gillian Balfour pointed to her record as an educator and academic leader.

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Lightning hit the OPP's Thunder Bay communications centre on August 25, taking down the facility and its communication systems. Sgt. Joe Brisebois of the OPP's central region headquarters says operations were immediately transferred to the force's North Bay centre so 911 and non-emergency calls kept being answered, and that normal operations resumed Monday. The Thunder Bay facility is one of four OPP communications centres in Ontario, and the four-centre design exists precisely so one can pick up another's calls when something like this happens. Which, on a night when a summer storm takes out your dispatch centre, is a fairly good argument for redundancy.

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Two ponytail palms have bloomed at the Thunder Bay Botanical Conservatory, and facility curator Andrea Nickerson says nobody working there has seen it happen before — the roughly 30-foot plants take 10 to 30 years to flower. Walk in, turn west toward the cactus room, and look up: the yellow spikes are reaching for the ceiling. “We don't often look up when we're at the conservatory,” Nickerson told Newswatch. The colour tells you the sex — yellow means male; a female would bloom pink. A second ponytail palm in the collection might flower in the next decade, and if that one comes up pink the Conservatory could harvest seed. Each bloom, she says, is millions of microscopic flowers on a single spike. There's also a Mangave agave in the cactus room growing about an inch a day and getting ready to flower — agaves normally die after blooming, but this one may not, and staff are watching to find out. The plants are native to arid Mexico, not Northwestern Ontario, which makes the whole thing a little more improbable.

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